Motivate

One system to rule them all

Motivate is on a mission to revolutionize the landscape of our cities. They make cities more accessible, healthy, and sustainable by planning, launching, and operating bike share systems around the world. They started Portland’s BIKETOWN, expanded New York’s Citi Bike, and currently facilitate the operation of a dozen world-class bike share systems.

Motivate collaborated with Happy Cog because managing their previous sites had become a nightmare. Users on the go were unable to find the information they needed on mobile. The sites weren’t effectively communicating the value proposition of becoming a member. Tourists weren’t encountering enough useful information to consider purchasing a day pass. Motivate needed a new platform that would solve these problems and allow them to spin up a new website faster than they could launch a new bike share. Happy Cog worked closely with Motivate to streamline the process of creating and maintaining these websites.

What we did

Industry

Awards

Davey Awards, Silver, Transportation, 2016

W3 Awards, Silver, Transportation, 2016

Webby, Honoree, Green, 2017

Iconography color can be changed via the CMS without creating new graphics.

While every city’s site is hierarchically consistent in layout and information architecture, each feels distinctly like their city. We established alpha and beta styles for type and color, along with easy-to-update image and icon assets. This made the design system flexible enough to work well for every bike share brand, yet rigid enough to ensure the hierarchy and user experience remain solid.

One of the most powerful outcomes of the project was our custom CMS build. We extended Craft in a way that allows it to support multiple sites via a “headless” approach. A single CMS for an infinite number of websites.